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Democracy in action! Here are the blog posts from the “Tips” series which have received the most traffic in 2012. Tips is a series on The SA Incubator which aims to provide young and early-career science writers with, well, tips to aid them in their budding careers.

This is the last part of my interview with Stephanie V. W. Lucianovic, author of Suffering Succotash: A Picky Eater's Quest to Understand Why We Hate the Foods We Hate, conducted earlier this month over lunch at Evvia in Palo Alto.

November 2012 temperatures relative to average across the globe With a less-than-stellar end to the Qatar climate talks, and with all eyes on the US for more ambitious commitments ahead of the next round, it is more important than ever for the American public to be better educated on the dire implications of a rapidly warming world.Despite a recent shift toward greater belief in anthropogenic climate change, perception of its risks remains low among the US public.A study published in the September issue of Nature Climate Change may help explain why.

The tsunami of Indonesia 2004 and Japan 2011 showed that they are a common element associated with earthquakes. Modern databases list more than 2.000 tsunami events worldwide in the last 4.000 years, most of them recorded in historic documents, chronicles and even myths - and yet tsunami deposits in the geological record seem to be relatively rare.In theory a tsunami can trigger a variety of erosion and depositional processes, like uprush and backwash currents, turbidity currents, debris flows and landslides, therefore also the formed sediments can vary from fine-grained sediments to large boulders.- When the tsunami hits the coast it will first erode older sediments.

The next two episodes of Wild Sex are by far the most popular. In the first, aptly titled 'Beach Babes and Boob Jobs', I look at the concept of beauty in the animal kingdom and how this concept does not really apply to the human animal.

Earth-like? Or not.... (Image:PHL @ UPR Arecibo, ESA/Hubble, NASA) This year has been a spectacular one for exoplanets. New discoveries and new insights have truly pushed the gateway to other worlds even further open. In the past 12 months we've gained increasingly good statistics on the incredible abundance of planets around other stars and their multiplicity.

We continue my interview with Stephanie V. W. Lucianovic, author of Suffering Succotash: A Picky Eater’s Quest to Understand Why We Hate the Foods We Hate, conducted earlier this month over lunch at Evvia in Palo Alto.

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